Well, that and custom add-on code often blows up under 2.7 unless it's re-factored (or in some cases re-written), and nobody ever seems to want to do that...
Government takes out my brakes? No problem, shift into first and engine-brake going 10 mph down the hill.
Good luck with that at any speed which would have the potential to kill you
Actually, it's quite doable, as long as there's no slower/stopped traffic in front of you for a long enough distance. Here's how you do it: You let off the gas and kick it down by one gear, then downshift further as the car slows down, while keeping an eye on the tachometer to make sure you don't completely red-line it - even downhill, the engine itself acts as a brake quite well in most cars and small SUVs.
It's only when you're in very large/heavy SUVs and or trucks where a brake outage would be a massive life-or-death situation (or worse, a loaded semi w/ trailer, in which case you'd better pray for an emergency braking ramp to hit before the Jacobs brake gives out completely or becomes totally ineffective.)
But nah, let's not educate the executives on how to safely handle critical data, because they should know without being told and it feels so good to laugh at them when they make a mistake.
Yeah, I know - sarcasm... but educating a CxO isn't as hard as you think - the only real trick is to carve enough time out of them to do it.
Seriously? The average CEO salary is nowhere near "millions". You only find that kind of cheddar in the Fortune 500 companies, and even then you'd often have to count stock options into the total.
Hell, in the last two companies I worked in, the School Board Superintendent of Portland, OR made more ($250k) than either of them (~$150k and $175k, respectively).
I remember a CEO of a moderate-sized corp (!?) who didn't see the need for locking down his Blackberry.... until he lost it one night while out on the town. Took me all of five minutes to crawl out of bed and wipe/lock the device remotely via BES, but the funny part was that it took that incident (and a gentle explanation of why I wiped his device - he originally wanted me to "locate" it for him) before he figured out that security was more than just a buzzword that got in his way.
Think about things around your house and then imagine if they were connected.
I did - in 1999, when Sun was pushing their Jini framework up at the University of Utah. They even had this cute little video of what an Internet-connected house looked and acted like.
I got to ask the first question in their Q&A session. I asked them how the setup would prevent me from, say, breaking into their home network, locking their freezer defrost on permanently, keep the doors permanently unlocked in spite of saying they're locked, lock their televisions on 24/7 and to only porn channels, turn on the A/C full-blast during wintertime (or the heater during summer) - oh, or make all the bedroom lights come on and off randomly at 1-2 minute intervals throughout the night.
They mumbled something about "we're working on security" and gave me a mug. Every question after that from everyone else only got worse from there.
Did that i7 just have no cooling at all, was overclocked, or did you disable all the safeties somehow? Even the old pentium mobiles would throttle down and eventually just shut down if they got too hot - saving its own life and a world of hurt for the owner.
It was a Samsung RC-512... it had c(sorta adequate) cooling and SpeedStep enabled, and no overclocking, but over time (around 8 months) I was forced to set processor affinity for the high-end render apps down to just half the cores, lest it just kick out and shut down the laptop.
Okay, kidding. But it does bring up a small question: When can these things get up enough horsepower to allow my laptop more space for battery and disk?
(Also, how much can you cram into it before it overloads on the thermals? I can use LuxRender to destroy a full-blown i7 that way, so it's not like this is just a small CPU problem.)
I guess it's cute and all to make tiny computers, but I'm curious as to when this will translate into something usable on the 'bigger' end, e.g. laptops and servers.
Example: Kodak could have capitalized on it by pushing digital photography, then moved more aggressively than HP into the printing realm (where folks could "develop" their digital photographs), using their arguably superior color technology to print pro-level photos. It could have been as simple as plugging an early digital camera (or its storage chip) into an early digital camera printer. Sort of what HP did with the whole "PhotoShare" concept. Make it easy enough that the printer kicks off as soon as the user loads/connects the camera and hits a button, maybe specifying what size they want it printed in (wallet, 4x6, etc).
To go more aggressive, they could have built a Tumblr/Instagram-like capability themselves by partnering with phone makers in the early stages (e.g. Nokia). It's not like smartphones were the first to include a camera onboard...
Instead, what we got was Kodak flopping around with half-assed concepts, and HP picking up and running away with it.
The shift out of poverty level would be tricky, I agree. Perhaps it could be that those below poverty level pay half the percentage until they surpass that level, then they pay the full rate? I left in poverty level as an inflection point for obvious reasons, and as a nod towards the need for at least some sort of charity.
That said, a truly progressive taxation would be a fixed percentage otherwise. 20% of $1m is definitely going to be greater than 20% of $100k, so the rich actually would end up paying more, and literally their fair share of the overall governmental burden. The more you make, the more you pay. Anything else is objectively punitive, as it punishes success - we want to incentivize success.
Actually, tax evasion is as old as taxes. Oil companies have managed to neatly avoid paying many taxes long before the Internet was invented.
If you really want more tax revenue, you have to eliminate all the credits and loopholes. You can't do that though, or else everyone would scream. Corporations demanding that their loopholes allow them to invest in growth will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the middle-class dude demanding his mortgage interest deduction, and they in turn would stand next to the poorest Cholo Queen demanding her EIC for the 6 fatherless kids she has living in her apartment.
It's all a game when you talk tax rates, since everyone has at least some means of ducking out of it.
If you were truly interested in having everyone pay their "fair share", you'd tax a flat percentage of all income above poverty level, with no loopholes, deductions, or credits.
But, nobody would go for that - even the most left-wing and right-wing ideologues would both decry it.
* *
Meanwhile, let's look at the employment situation. How much does Google spend on payroll compared to what Kodak spent in their prime (adjusted for inflation, naturally)? That would be the fairest comparison between the two. I'm not certain how they would compare, but I bet that Google does spend a bit more, considering that they're not hiring factory workers, but engineers, developers, etc. That said, it's not just the number of employees we're talking about either - it's how much the average employee gets paid, as well as the total payroll. I'm willing to bet that Google's average is probably higher (consider where they've parked their offices, compared to where Kodak had/has their offices and facilities).
Yup - that leaves out the headcounts, which is what I think you were going for. Then again, it's not necessarily about headcount, since the two companies are in vastly different industries. If you're talking about money going into the system, then you have to compare money with money, which is why I chose payroll overhead as a metric, correlated with average pay. That tells you how much money goes into the system.
Regarding imports: that's the purvey of Congress, who can levy taxes and equalize prices for foreign subsidized savings (ie, labor) Congress has utterly failed at doing its job here, a standard levy of 15-20% would go a long way to equalizing the playing field, and having imports support the taxes lost to imports (in the form of jobs going overseas). Yes, this increases costs of imports, but perhaps that should happen.
Dunno how else to say it, but it's not as clear-cut as you state: Toyota and Honda (and Kia, Hyundai, etc) manufacture cars in factories, here in the US, specifically to avoid existing tariffs. Congress can slap on a 500% tariff on all import cars, but it wouldn't change the price of the Honda Civic - the Civics for sale here are made right here, within US borders.
For physical objects, I agree that hands-on is best.
On the other hand, if you're doing this professionally, it's trivial to have the potential vendor drop off a demo unit that you can test on-site (or if it's a big item, arrange a trip to go see it in action on someone else's site.)
Case in point? A few years back, I wanted something that worked well with VDI on a production floor, but didn't require the expense and upkeep of even a thin-client. We wanted something cheap that you could use and toss into the trash w/o worry when it breaks, because the production floor was sometimes a dirty, merciless place. Literally a couple hours of searching later, I found these little guys, which were cheaper per-unit than the typical thin-client. I called the company, had a quick conference call, and they happily sent out four of them for me to play with, as did a few other potential vendors with their low-end thin clients. The little units worked perfectly for the task during trials, so we wound up buying a few hundred more. They were on-hand to walk me through what was needed to get them hooked up, integrated and running.
The point is this: I didn't need to spend a week on-the-road while trying to keep up with workload and family demands, nor did I have to try and have a serious conversation about some product in a noisy hall full of literal bells and whistles going off.
Don't get me wrong - once in awhile a junket is a beautiful thing. If I prepared for it in advance, the workload was (usually) light while I was out, and I took the missus along so that she could have some fun while I'm sniffing around the booths and learning about new stuff.
I will admit one thing that the shows had, which I do not find a parallel for nowadays: The chance to talk to peers outside of the local network/bubble.
That's the thing - when it comes to the motivation for looking, you usually have a problem and are looking for a solution to it (hence Google), or have come up with (or in reality get stuck with) a project, and you're looking for means to help complete it, so you go looking, and...
The 'gee whiz that's new!' stuff usually comes to you courtesy of whatever new sites you frequent, and again, if something blows your dress up, you can search online for more info.
But it's not really about publicity - I know when I've been to the show myself, there's basically loads of people wandering aroudn just trying to get as much free stuff as they can. Possibly only 1% of people you turn up to your booth actually wants to know about your product and most of them won't actually generate any business.
The reason why? Easy - if I want to know about your product, I'll go Google it, see if your company/product turns up, then maybe call you up if I want/need more information about it.
Trade shows are a vestige of the pre-Internet age. They formed at a time when getting info on new and upcoming tech was actual work, or involved slogging through phonebook-thick magazines containing up to 80% ads, 15% fluff, and 5% actual useful information.
Back in the day, you went to COMDEX, NetWorld, and all those shows because that was the only way you were going to learn jack about the products. You also got something the trade pubs and (at the time) embryonic web could not provide you at the time: a working demo of the damned thing. Even on a non-generic level, you didn't go to Novell's Brainshare to take in the party atmosphere of Salt Lake City in Winter - you went so you could learn something, and to test out the new bits before you committed a purchase order to it.
COMDEX and NetWorld died a long time ago. CES is IMHO an anomaly - a holdover from that era.
Some hybrid trade shows cropped up (see also VMWorld), but the trade-show aspect is secondary to the goal of testing/teaching/advertising by the primary sponsor (VMWorld also had a neat trick of allowing selected customers to speak directly with various developer teams, so that you could suggest features, bitch about stuff that didn't work so hot, and show off tricks and tips you learned independently of them. In return, they got feedback on potential products they were building in pre-Alpha stage.)
You seem to be forgetting one important factor, those armed groups that will roam taking what they want, shooting people pretty much for something as little as a single meal or bottle of water.
Not sure that would be as big of a factor, at least outside of whatever groups form from the inhabitants already living in the region. Anyone else is going to be way too busy trying not to get killed by the meters-deep layer of ash, let alone travel anywhere in it.
As a resident of the Pacific Northwest, I can say for certain that at least outside the metro/urban areas, everyone is pretty much armed to the teeth, so anyone with any ideas along those lines is going to have a very hard slog ahead of them...
I understand that you're looking at the raw numbers, and they're damned impressive.
However, shock waves can be deflected - and multiple mountain-sized deflectors (from my POV, the Rockies and Cascades, featuring Mt. Hood) are more than sufficient to do the job of keeping my house and office from flattening.
Now that said, Anything North and East of the spot is gonna get it pretty hard for hundreds of miles in radius. But the shock wave isn't really what you have to worry about - odds are perfect it'll blow in stages anyway.
Nope - the really big dangers are twofold:
First, we have metric shitloads of volcanic ash (anything North of Salt Lake City is gonna get buried in the stuff rather deeply, it'll likely put a coating of some depth on everything eastwards from Yellowstone to New York City, and breathing microscopic glass shards is not going to be fun).
Second, as others have stated? Welcome to Volcanic Winter. Unless you have something like 2-3 years' worth of food stashed away (and some means of filtering water the whole time), you're gonna be screwed (and cold.) Global Warming will be not much more than a distant memory and the butt of every joke around (among the survivors, anyway. The dead don't joke much.)
Some good news, though: Once the skies clear up enough and the temperature comes up to normal again, that's going to be some damned fertile soil to grow stuff in.
There is one more option that allows population growth, but it involves a lot of investment in rocketry, self-sufficient environments, and zero/low-gravity construction techniques.
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Well, that and custom add-on code often blows up under 2.7 unless it's re-factored (or in some cases re-written), and nobody ever seems to want to do that...
If I lost 100 lbs and got $100k in plastic surgery I could maybe be a model too!
...a model what?
( *poof!* - you're now plastic and at 1/144th scale )
"Wow - a rhubarb pie? For me? Let me carve out a slice right now!"
"BZZZZERK!"
Counting only publicly-traded companies is cherry-picking, me lad.
Government takes out my brakes? No problem, shift into first and engine-brake going 10 mph down the hill.
Good luck with that at any speed which would have the potential to kill you
Actually, it's quite doable, as long as there's no slower/stopped traffic in front of you for a long enough distance. Here's how you do it: You let off the gas and kick it down by one gear, then downshift further as the car slows down, while keeping an eye on the tachometer to make sure you don't completely red-line it - even downhill, the engine itself acts as a brake quite well in most cars and small SUVs.
It's only when you're in very large/heavy SUVs and or trucks where a brake outage would be a massive life-or-death situation (or worse, a loaded semi w/ trailer, in which case you'd better pray for an emergency braking ramp to hit before the Jacobs brake gives out completely or becomes totally ineffective.)
It means I don't particularly worry if anyone does or not. ;)
But nah, let's not educate the executives on how to safely handle critical data, because they should know without being told and it feels so good to laugh at them when they make a mistake.
Yeah, I know - sarcasm... but educating a CxO isn't as hard as you think - the only real trick is to carve enough time out of them to do it.
Seriously? The average CEO salary is nowhere near "millions". You only find that kind of cheddar in the Fortune 500 companies, and even then you'd often have to count stock options into the total.
Hell, in the last two companies I worked in, the School Board Superintendent of Portland, OR made more ($250k) than either of them (~$150k and $175k, respectively).
Sad, but true.
I remember a CEO of a moderate-sized corp (!?) who didn't see the need for locking down his Blackberry.... until he lost it one night while out on the town. Took me all of five minutes to crawl out of bed and wipe/lock the device remotely via BES, but the funny part was that it took that incident (and a gentle explanation of why I wiped his device - he originally wanted me to "locate" it for him) before he figured out that security was more than just a buzzword that got in his way.
*ahem*
(...they've been around since the 1940's.)
Think about things around your house and then imagine if they were connected.
I did - in 1999, when Sun was pushing their Jini framework up at the University of Utah. They even had this cute little video of what an Internet-connected house looked and acted like.
I got to ask the first question in their Q&A session. I asked them how the setup would prevent me from, say, breaking into their home network, locking their freezer defrost on permanently, keep the doors permanently unlocked in spite of saying they're locked, lock their televisions on 24/7 and to only porn channels, turn on the A/C full-blast during wintertime (or the heater during summer) - oh, or make all the bedroom lights come on and off randomly at 1-2 minute intervals throughout the night.
They mumbled something about "we're working on security" and gave me a mug. Every question after that from everyone else only got worse from there.
Did that i7 just have no cooling at all, was overclocked, or did you disable all the safeties somehow? Even the old pentium mobiles would throttle down and eventually just shut down if they got too hot - saving its own life and a world of hurt for the owner.
It was a Samsung RC-512... it had c(sorta adequate) cooling and SpeedStep enabled, and no overclocking, but over time (around 8 months) I was forced to set processor affinity for the high-end render apps down to just half the cores, lest it just kick out and shut down the laptop.
Would you pay for that?
No, but I bet the exhibitors would.
Okay, kidding. But it does bring up a small question: When can these things get up enough horsepower to allow my laptop more space for battery and disk?
(Also, how much can you cram into it before it overloads on the thermals? I can use LuxRender to destroy a full-blown i7 that way, so it's not like this is just a small CPU problem.)
I guess it's cute and all to make tiny computers, but I'm curious as to when this will translate into something usable on the 'bigger' end, e.g. laptops and servers.
Well, yes and no (on a meta level :) ).
Example: Kodak could have capitalized on it by pushing digital photography, then moved more aggressively than HP into the printing realm (where folks could "develop" their digital photographs), using their arguably superior color technology to print pro-level photos. It could have been as simple as plugging an early digital camera (or its storage chip) into an early digital camera printer. Sort of what HP did with the whole "PhotoShare" concept. Make it easy enough that the printer kicks off as soon as the user loads/connects the camera and hits a button, maybe specifying what size they want it printed in (wallet, 4x6, etc).
To go more aggressive, they could have built a Tumblr/Instagram-like capability themselves by partnering with phone makers in the early stages (e.g. Nokia). It's not like smartphones were the first to include a camera onboard...
Instead, what we got was Kodak flopping around with half-assed concepts, and HP picking up and running away with it.
The shift out of poverty level would be tricky, I agree. Perhaps it could be that those below poverty level pay half the percentage until they surpass that level, then they pay the full rate? I left in poverty level as an inflection point for obvious reasons, and as a nod towards the need for at least some sort of charity.
That said, a truly progressive taxation would be a fixed percentage otherwise. 20% of $1m is definitely going to be greater than 20% of $100k, so the rich actually would end up paying more, and literally their fair share of the overall governmental burden. The more you make, the more you pay. Anything else is objectively punitive, as it punishes success - we want to incentivize success.
Well, to be fair, Kodak screwed themselves as well... they pretty much invented digital photography, but utterly failed to capitalize on it.
Actually, tax evasion is as old as taxes. Oil companies have managed to neatly avoid paying many taxes long before the Internet was invented.
If you really want more tax revenue, you have to eliminate all the credits and loopholes. You can't do that though, or else everyone would scream. Corporations demanding that their loopholes allow them to invest in growth will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the middle-class dude demanding his mortgage interest deduction, and they in turn would stand next to the poorest Cholo Queen demanding her EIC for the 6 fatherless kids she has living in her apartment.
It's all a game when you talk tax rates, since everyone has at least some means of ducking out of it.
If you were truly interested in having everyone pay their "fair share", you'd tax a flat percentage of all income above poverty level, with no loopholes, deductions, or credits.
But, nobody would go for that - even the most left-wing and right-wing ideologues would both decry it.
* *
Meanwhile, let's look at the employment situation. How much does Google spend on payroll compared to what Kodak spent in their prime (adjusted for inflation, naturally)? That would be the fairest comparison between the two. I'm not certain how they would compare, but I bet that Google does spend a bit more, considering that they're not hiring factory workers, but engineers, developers, etc. That said, it's not just the number of employees we're talking about either - it's how much the average employee gets paid, as well as the total payroll. I'm willing to bet that Google's average is probably higher (consider where they've parked their offices, compared to where Kodak had/has their offices and facilities).
Yup - that leaves out the headcounts, which is what I think you were going for. Then again, it's not necessarily about headcount, since the two companies are in vastly different industries. If you're talking about money going into the system, then you have to compare money with money, which is why I chose payroll overhead as a metric, correlated with average pay. That tells you how much money goes into the system.
Regarding imports: that's the purvey of Congress, who can levy taxes and equalize prices for foreign subsidized savings (ie, labor) Congress has utterly failed at doing its job here, a standard levy of 15-20% would go a long way to equalizing the playing field, and having imports support the taxes lost to imports (in the form of jobs going overseas). Yes, this increases costs of imports, but perhaps that should happen.
Dunno how else to say it, but it's not as clear-cut as you state: Toyota and Honda (and Kia, Hyundai, etc) manufacture cars in factories, here in the US, specifically to avoid existing tariffs. Congress can slap on a 500% tariff on all import cars, but it wouldn't change the price of the Honda Civic - the Civics for sale here are made right here, within US borders.
For physical objects, I agree that hands-on is best.
On the other hand, if you're doing this professionally, it's trivial to have the potential vendor drop off a demo unit that you can test on-site (or if it's a big item, arrange a trip to go see it in action on someone else's site.)
Case in point? A few years back, I wanted something that worked well with VDI on a production floor, but didn't require the expense and upkeep of even a thin-client. We wanted something cheap that you could use and toss into the trash w/o worry when it breaks, because the production floor was sometimes a dirty, merciless place. Literally a couple hours of searching later, I found these little guys, which were cheaper per-unit than the typical thin-client. I called the company, had a quick conference call, and they happily sent out four of them for me to play with, as did a few other potential vendors with their low-end thin clients. The little units worked perfectly for the task during trials, so we wound up buying a few hundred more. They were on-hand to walk me through what was needed to get them hooked up, integrated and running.
The point is this: I didn't need to spend a week on-the-road while trying to keep up with workload and family demands, nor did I have to try and have a serious conversation about some product in a noisy hall full of literal bells and whistles going off.
Don't get me wrong - once in awhile a junket is a beautiful thing. If I prepared for it in advance, the workload was (usually) light while I was out, and I took the missus along so that she could have some fun while I'm sniffing around the booths and learning about new stuff.
I will admit one thing that the shows had, which I do not find a parallel for nowadays: The chance to talk to peers outside of the local network/bubble.
That's the thing - when it comes to the motivation for looking, you usually have a problem and are looking for a solution to it (hence Google), or have come up with (or in reality get stuck with) a project, and you're looking for means to help complete it, so you go looking, and...
The 'gee whiz that's new!' stuff usually comes to you courtesy of whatever new sites you frequent, and again, if something blows your dress up, you can search online for more info.
But it's not really about publicity - I know when I've been to the show myself, there's basically loads of people wandering aroudn just trying to get as much free stuff as they can. Possibly only 1% of people you turn up to your booth actually wants to know about your product and most of them won't actually generate any business.
The reason why? Easy - if I want to know about your product, I'll go Google it, see if your company/product turns up, then maybe call you up if I want/need more information about it.
Trade shows are a vestige of the pre-Internet age. They formed at a time when getting info on new and upcoming tech was actual work, or involved slogging through phonebook-thick magazines containing up to 80% ads, 15% fluff, and 5% actual useful information.
Back in the day, you went to COMDEX, NetWorld, and all those shows because that was the only way you were going to learn jack about the products. You also got something the trade pubs and (at the time) embryonic web could not provide you at the time: a working demo of the damned thing. Even on a non-generic level, you didn't go to Novell's Brainshare to take in the party atmosphere of Salt Lake City in Winter - you went so you could learn something, and to test out the new bits before you committed a purchase order to it.
COMDEX and NetWorld died a long time ago. CES is IMHO an anomaly - a holdover from that era.
Some hybrid trade shows cropped up (see also VMWorld), but the trade-show aspect is secondary to the goal of testing/teaching/advertising by the primary sponsor (VMWorld also had a neat trick of allowing selected customers to speak directly with various developer teams, so that you could suggest features, bitch about stuff that didn't work so hot, and show off tricks and tips you learned independently of them. In return, they got feedback on potential products they were building in pre-Alpha stage.)
You seem to be forgetting one important factor, those armed groups that will roam taking what they want, shooting people pretty much for something as little as a single meal or bottle of water.
Not sure that would be as big of a factor, at least outside of whatever groups form from the inhabitants already living in the region. Anyone else is going to be way too busy trying not to get killed by the meters-deep layer of ash, let alone travel anywhere in it.
As a resident of the Pacific Northwest, I can say for certain that at least outside the metro/urban areas, everyone is pretty much armed to the teeth, so anyone with any ideas along those lines is going to have a very hard slog ahead of them...
I understand that you're looking at the raw numbers, and they're damned impressive.
However, shock waves can be deflected - and multiple mountain-sized deflectors (from my POV, the Rockies and Cascades, featuring Mt. Hood) are more than sufficient to do the job of keeping my house and office from flattening.
Now that said, Anything North and East of the spot is gonna get it pretty hard for hundreds of miles in radius. But the shock wave isn't really what you have to worry about - odds are perfect it'll blow in stages anyway.
Nope - the really big dangers are twofold:
First, we have metric shitloads of volcanic ash (anything North of Salt Lake City is gonna get buried in the stuff rather deeply, it'll likely put a coating of some depth on everything eastwards from Yellowstone to New York City, and breathing microscopic glass shards is not going to be fun).
Second, as others have stated? Welcome to Volcanic Winter. Unless you have something like 2-3 years' worth of food stashed away (and some means of filtering water the whole time), you're gonna be screwed (and cold.) Global Warming will be not much more than a distant memory and the butt of every joke around (among the survivors, anyway. The dead don't joke much.)
Some good news, though: Once the skies clear up enough and the temperature comes up to normal again, that's going to be some damned fertile soil to grow stuff in.
There is one more option that allows population growth, but it involves a lot of investment in rocketry, self-sufficient environments, and zero/low-gravity construction techniques.